


Families

by AnnetheCatDetective



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: A Resolution On The Last Name Issue, Cecil Has Abandonment Issues, Cecil is Human, Episode: 33 Cassette, Gen, M/M, No Tentacles, Self-Conscious Cecil
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-16
Updated: 2013-10-16
Packaged: 2017-12-29 14:13:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1006381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnnetheCatDetective/pseuds/AnnetheCatDetective
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cecil has three families, he thinks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Families

I.

\---/-/---

Mrs. Palmer did not hyphenate, when she married, but on the birth of her second son, she thought it might be nice if her own family name lived on a little bit longer. It meant saddling him with an awkward middle name, but she had heard stranger, and anyway, it was never insisted upon, on introducing yourself to strangers, that you give your middle name. 

Her firstborn son, she had been careful with, the way a first time mother is careful. Her own mother, the indomitable Mrs. Eleanora Gershwin, had been a great help, had half-raised the boy his first year of life.

Mrs. Gershwin only met her second grandson the once, something Cecil does not remember, would not be able to remember even if his memories had not been tampered with and trampled through so many times. 

He was an infant, at the time, was lying in his cradle when she glided up, silent, her long dress swishing around slippered feet. Wanting so badly to tell her daughter what a beautiful boy he was, wanting so badly to hold him. 

She had reached down, begun to lift him, when Mrs. Palmer rushed in, her face contorted in fear, to hiss 'Mother, NO!', to snatch her child up from ghostly hands that would drop him, as sure as sugar would drop him, insubstantial. Dead a year, but she did want to see her grandson. She could have lifted him but she never could have kept from dropping him.

Mrs. Palmer was exhausted, a brittle woman with the pinched look of constant fear that came with being Night Vale's premier seer. A skill her firstborn was mercifully free of, she was so glad for that. Her oldest boy was strong, resilient, callous in that way natural to youth. A healthy, normal boy.

Cecil, she often feared, had inherited too much from her side of the family. He did not quite have her gift, not the way that she did. He had bits and pieces, reminded her of her father shrunk down in miniature at times. A man serenely accepting of visions he could not really control, who did not know enough to know, who did not fear his terrible gift because he was not burdened with too much control of it. 

Mrs. Palmer, with the control she did have, had a Responsibility. To the gift and to the town and to the children who frightened her sometimes, in different ways, so young and fearless. She was frightened for Cecil most of all, because there were hazy things about him. She knew only the patchwork version of his life. She could not see what wife or children might lie in his future, or how much future he would have. It terrified her not to know when he would die, only to know that it would be ugly, and that he may have to watch it happen.

Her oldest didn't frighten her like that. He would go with her, and that was a comfort. 

\---/-/---

II.

\---/-/---

"The city can't take the Palmer house!"

"Mrs. Baldwin--"

"Mrs. Baldwin," She sniffs, her voice sharp, and the City Council is cowed for a moment, because they have never heard her voice sharp before, and because every one of them sees their grandmother in her. "Was my mother. And it's just Ms. And it isn't even that. What about the boy?"

"He'll have an inheritance, when he's of age, but the house--" They start, in unison, and all stop short together under her glare, clear their throats as one and begin again. "He's an orphan--"

"I'll take him." She says firmly, because in their day, Eleanora Gershwin and Josephine Baldwin had been as close as sisters to each other, and since the end of the only ghostly visit young Cecil Palmer had ever received from his maternal grandmother, Old Woman Josie has been the closest thing he's ever known to one.

The City Council does not argue. They only produce the proper paperwork.

When she arrives at the house, armored social workers are huddled in a semi-circle around the bewildered teen, ready to take him in as an orphan despite his broken protests.

"I'm sure it will be okay!" He is saying, his hands outstretched as if to ward them off, his back against a wall. His glasses are gone, broken, somewhere. "I'm fifteen, I can take care of myself for a couple of days, it'll be fine!"

Something has touched him, left him dazed, half-aware, and it breaks her heart to have to tell him that it isn't a couple of days without his family. 

The City Council takes him away, before they let her bring him home. He remembers that he'd had a mother, and that now he does not, and he is calmly accepting of the fact most of the time, but Josie can see that he is not trying very hard to understand. She wonders if they tried to erase Mrs. Palmer from her son's mind entirely-- laughable, no one could ever erase a mother, only soften her edges, obscure the lies in cold, hard facts to leave a smooth-polished truth. Cecil remembers a woman who was not constantly pinched in fear, and who looked a little like him, the woman who had once been the little girl in the photo on Old Woman Josie's mantle, sitting in the lap of Old Woman Josie's best friend. He does not argue that someone is coming back to him, though she thinks he sometimes wishes that he could and does not know how. He does not reject the change of his last name on official documents, and she does not know whether to be pleased or saddened. But until he is ready to be on his own, she cares for him like he is hers, and feels her heart break every time she thinks he expects her to vanish, too.

\---/-/---

III.

\---/-/---

Cecil doesn't know if he wants to read Carlos' text, after the show. He doesn't think he could handle it, if he were to be accused of hiding things, things he didn't know himself. He doesn't think he could handle being treated as if not knowing his own past is unacceptable, abnormal, unhealthy. He feels he could break under pity, but he knows he would not survive indifference. It is easier, not to look.

But it is Carlos, whose life has been steadily mixing into Cecil's own, into one unified Thing, Carlos who has a key to Cecil's apartment and a little space there to keep his things on nights spent sleeping over now, and a spare toothbrush, and maybe someday, maybe very soon, Cecil had thought-- had hoped-- that they would have a little bit more of each others' daily lives than that. So he reads the text.

He types 'Y' and hits send.

'Did you mean Y for why or Y for yes' Carlos' text back comes almost immediately. 

'Y' Cecil sends, and then 'K', and then 'Please'.

'I'm coming over', Carlos sends. 'Unless you say no'

Cecil does not text back. 

Carlos does not ask questions, even though Cecil can tell he wants to. It is one of the things that scientists and reporters have in common, one of the things that he and Carlos have in common. The need to ask questions. A need that Night Vale has not been able to train Cecil out of, though there are mysteries that he will leave unprobed. Chief among those, his own past.

Now, he does not know if he wants to know. He does not know if his mother, a woman he remembers vaguely and so fondly, if she had been frightened of him, at the end. He does not know what caused her to disappear, and does not remember the brother that she took with her. The woman he described onto that tape cannot be the woman he remembers, the life he described cannot be his life. 

He'd known his real name, of course, and sometimes he used it... not often. It brought with it questions. Why his middle name was a last name and whose it had once been and what had become of the rest of the Palmers, and more besides. Questions that it was not his duty as a reporter to ask. Questions it was best to avoid.

Carlos holds him, and Cecil does not ask, though he wants to, when Carlos thinks he will Leave. 

Cecil does not think he is such a great catch. How can he, when his past is full of holes and those holes are frightening? How can he be wanted, kept, stayed with? He has been abandoned before, and not only by the family he fears he misremembers. The leaving was not always cruel-- sometimes the cruelty came in coming back later, in touching him with too much familiar warmth and saying wistful things about a past walked away from, and then disappearing entirely. Which he supposes is also a kind of abandoning, one that knots him up inside if he lets himself think about it, with anger and frustration. 

And the station is so different, and the coffee tastes different, and he finds himself thinking less about interns who will also, always, disappear. He finds himself thinking less and less with each cup, about the interns and the new yellow helicopters and the change in management, but he cannot think less and less about the tape even after destroying it, and when he is home, he finds himself thinking more and more, finds himself horrified. Horrified by the things he knows, the things he does not know, and most deeply of all, horrified by the little truths of his own existence. 

And someday, he thinks, Carlos will have to Leave. Maybe it will not be because of Cecil, maybe it will be because of Science, and Funding, and Grant Money and Faraway Projects. He does not know which would hurt more. He does not even know if his mother thought of him, in fear or in love, when last she looked at him. More than half a lifetime ago, things he does not and will not remember, sweet void above he prays not to remember some of the things he thinks he has heard. 

Carlos holds him, and does not ask questions, and does not talk about the possibility of Leaving. 

It is, for this one night at least, the best he can ask for.


End file.
